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Sep 15

15

It doesn’t matter which political ideology you belong to but for democracy to function correctly, you need to have a counterbalance. The people must be presented with at least two flavours in order to encourage debate and advancement. Innovation is the cornerstone of human essence, it’s why we’re not sitting in a tree, eating scraps of raw meat and thinking, “well, I’m alright, I’m not going down there.” Despotic regimes come from single entity governments/movements because they are free to do what they want (any old time … sorry, couldn’t resist that one).

The stunning emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Her Majesty’s opposition is of great concern. He is clearly unelectable and, although he sets pulses racing now, with people eager for change, as time moves on and his absurd ideas come to the surface, the Government will become complacent with the lack of resistance. This is dangerous as they need to be pushed by legitimate opposition. Corbyn may be popular with small sections of people that have infiltrated the Labour party but this is far from representative of the masses. Now there will be a feeding frenzy from those people, starved of attention for so long. With an often apathetic public (in regards to politics), that’s actually quite scary.

It is easy to see that a Labour party moving to the right and into the centre ground is electable. It happened. It is also easy to see that a Conservative party moving to the left and into the centre ground is also electable. It happened. It was plain that a Labour party moving slightly to the left with Ed Miliband was not electable – even against a fairly unpopular Conservative party that was in coalition with the Liberal Democrats! Therefore, it doesn’t require a hugely logical mind to see that a Labour party (if that’s what it still is) moving way off to the left is about as unelectable as a fascist far right party. In fact, you saw that UKIP got a very good percentage of votes when it leaned into the left and appealed to traditional Labour and Conservative supporters. The centre wins – it’s a bell shaped curve – there’s too much diversity in the UK to be anything else, despite social engineering efforts. Unlike some parties, the “Labour party” cannot now even infer that it’s anything other than extreme. Extreme never wins.

The short term issue will be the use of the limited power that this movement of people has gained. Until such time that it is properly discredited, it will be able to exert some influence, using Labour politicians that would otherwise not be involved, to encourage extreme militant socialist activities, such as strikes and the like. The impact of this will be to cause financial disruption and that will only increase the strain on the Treasury, which will in turn only increase the burden of austerity. I would hope that the people of the centre left will stand up and be counted, faced with this threat, else they will be complicit in bringing about further trouble and strife to the country that has enough to cope with already. Given the performance in the General Election and the subsequent in-fighting, I suspect they don’t have the backbone for it.